The Dunne Family
Chamberlain, John
being famous for being famous. So long as convicted murderers are negotiating film rights at the eleventh hour, it seems reasonable that John and Mo Dean should soon be surrounded and propelled...
...Can they hope to survive at all...
...they complain about taxes...
...An Armenian Archbishop, who himself prepares the food for a dinner at his luxurious Jerusalem apartment, is offended when one of his guests smokes between courses: "This is Naomi Decter recently spent four years in Israel, studying at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem...
...they worry about making a living...
...We didn't hate the wops because they were Latins...
...And looking out over the hills of Judaea, he feels that "the light of Jerusalem has purifying powers and filters the blood and the thoughts...
...as an intellectual in a foreign country, he read up on the area, and pondered what he read, what he saw, and what he heard...
...Our Park Street gang included, besides a Ray Montgomery and a Linwood Tower, a Pole (Sinosky), a Jew (Silver), a German (Zimmerman), a Swede (Swebelius), a black (Clue), and an Irishman (Murray...
...The Irish, like other ethnics who had not had time to amass property, had to live through the period...
...Shimon Peres, Minister of Defense, "carries an aura...
...cummings, the lower case kid, wanted a poem that would be something more than .the Sandburgian or the Whitmanesque yawp--his Buffalo Bill rode, not a white horse, but a watersmooth silver stallion...
...For To Jerusalem andBaek is the journal of a man who is concerned ultimately with weightier matters, in a country where no political fact or event is ever taken lightly...
...But Sherman had already gone over to Rascoe's more "modern" values...
...Jim Farrell has preserved his vitality by sticking to his own--the world of the South Chicago Irish who represented the first of those ethnic minorities that our politicos, every second or fourth year, cultivate so assiduously in spite of the theory that we are all Americans together...
...Stuart Sherman, the Illinois professor who hated Dreiser, had replaced the pertinacious Burton Rascoe as editor of the Herald-Tribune Sunday Book Section...
...When Nora's children shuffle off delinquent spouses, it's good riddance to bad rubbish...
...The younger critics, however, wanted what Dorothy Dudley, in her great Forgotten Frontiers: Dreiser and the Land of the Free, has called "a fused native art...
...Farrell, like Conrad, makes you see...
...Our Malcolm Cowleys and MatthewJosephsons and Kenneth Burkes made shapeliness and sensitivity, not power, their critical touchstones...
...He notes the ugliness of post-British architecture in the new city...
...Realism was taken for granted...
...People and scenery provide but brief respite...
...In addition, Bellow reads and quotes from the writings of others equally concerned, among them Walter Laqueur, Elie Kedourie, Herman Kahn, and Lev Navrozov...
...They build ugly buildings...
...as bold as Dreiser's and more choice in manner...
...Are they, do they have an obligation to be, a just society in a universe of injustice...
...Fashions come and go...
...These questions constitute the daily catechism of the Israeli--only this catechism comes without answers...
...As a visiting luminary, he met with prominent Israelis...
...Yet certain critics--William Troy was one, Clifton Fadiman was another--saw considerably more than Dreiserian boldness in Farrell's works...
...Hemingway and Fitzgerald may have displaced Dreiser and Farrell for a while, but all four are now together in the pantheon of twentieth-century classics...
...I don't like ethnic politics...
...She sat resolutely behind her husband throughout the hearings, her blank face and enigmatic smile enchanting the~ nation with its discovery of a lobotomized Gioconda...
...Mayor Teddy Kollek, respected by all factions in Jerusalem, and "Israel's most valuable political asset," "virtuously" has only a salad for lunch, then polishes off an entire dish of sweets for dessert...
...I don't know why Jim Farrell asked me to do the introduction to the Modern Library edition of his Studs Lonigan trilogy (we always seemed to talk baseball when we got together in the New York City of the early thirties), but I leaped at the chance...
...We on Park Street were rivals of those who were ineleJohn Chamberlain, the veteran journalist, is a columnist for King Features Syndicate...
...Larry Dunne, who dies of paresis and tuberculosis, was always going to get a job, but you can lead a horse to water and still fail to make him drink...
...In a way, he has suffered the fate of his great forerunner, Theodore Dreiser, who is part of our literature but not a salient feature of our literary discourse...
...BOOK REVIEW The Dunne Family James T. Farrell / Doubleday / $8.95 John Chamberlain This is Jim Farrell's fiftieth book, published in his seventy-third year...
...Bellow is worried about the world, where "the eagerness to kill for political ends--or to justify killing by such ends--is as keen now as it ever was...
...Is Russia really a threat to peace in the Middle East and in the world...
...The old lady Grace Hogan Dunne, who came over from the old sod during the Civil War, is not long for this world...
...But above all he makes you hear...
...And from the moment he arrives, he finds himself caught up in the "gale of conversation-exposition, argument, harangue, analysis, theory, expostulation, threat and prophecy" that is standard Israeli fare...
...Nevertheless, despite its apparently desperate situation, Israel is not a desperate country...
...Appropriately, he is to be found in the pages of a journal devoted to rock music...
...We were an ethnic foreign legion...
...Housman poem, calls "a world I never made...
...Rock music is similarly a phenomenon of our times--most of its classics are jarring and inarticulate, usually of three to five minutes duration, the fashionable grist of scholars and publicists...
...Like Bellow's friend John Auerbach--a survivor of the Holocaust who found refuge in Israel, only to lose a son to the Yon Kippur War--they while away pleasant afternoons with friends...
...The shine of power is about him...
...Can the Israelis trust Kissinger...
...I grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, one block away from the Italian Oak Street slum...
...Farrell had the misfortune of coming to New York just after Mencken, in his "bulldog" work for Theodore Dreiser, had bested Puritanism as a literary force...
...He has encountered its often horrifying and sometimes tender realities without quibble or distortion...
...Studs Lonigan wanted to be "strong and tough and the real stuff...
...If the subject matter seems repetitious to one who must have read half of the Farrell books, it is no great cause for objection...
...Nobody of consequence objected to Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, or Jim Farrell, as purveyors of the post-genteel criteria of truth...
...They even know how to have a good time...
...But the best of each succeeding fashion works its way into the schools...
...Superstitious, the Dunnes are always knocking on wood...
...The trip proved rich in material for Bellow the storytellerl On his flight to Israel he meets a young Hasidic Jew, and Bellow's description of the inevitable confrontation over an unkosher chicken dinner perfectly evokes all the emotions roused in the lapsed-of-faith by the pious...
...Hemingway's prose was "lean, hard and athletic," but its athletic qualities were those of a gifted wide receiver, not the muscularity of the "toad" who opens holes in the line...
...they gossip about corruption in high places...
...parlayed his facility with one language, English, into the fifty books he has had published and the three or four he still has on the back burner...
...Should they accept the creation of yet another hostile state in their already dangerously unfriendly neighborhood...
...When I met Studs Lonigan and his friends, I had a sensation that I knew every last one of them...
...Mo, certainly, was sent down by Central Casting...
...So it was probably inevitable that, as book succeeded book, Farrell's place in American literature came to be taken for granted by critics who ran off to talk about Hemingway, or Fitzgerald, or the proletarian novel, or whatever...
...He is worried about Israel, where "there is one fact of Jewish life unchanged by the creation of a Jewish state: you cannot take your right to live for granted...
...So long as convicted murderers are negotiating film rights at the eleventh hour, it seems reasonable that John and Mo Dean should soon be surrounded and propelled by all the vast engines of modern publicity...
...Using slightly disguised names, I identified Tom McHugh, Dick Coyle, Jimmy Cline, Jimmy Corrigan, and others who used to patronize the pool room over Longley's Lunch in New Haven, with individuals in Farrell's South Chicago retinue...
...as a Jew in the Holy Land, he saw friends and relatives, and wandered around Jerusalem...
...Since then John has pursued every profitable avenue, settling at last into his current metamorphosis as journalist...
...It's threadbare language in flavorsome voice...
...Bellow is amused, touched and irritated, especially since the Hasid's importunings are not without effect: "I turn to the twice disagreeable chicken and eat guiltily, my appetite spoiled...
...The members of the Dunne family--the two brothers who failed at different times in "the shoe game," the mother who boasted in her wheelchair that she was still a "hard woman," the self-pitying and occasionally drunken daughter Jenny and her pious sister Nora--think and talk in the cliches of their South Chicago milieu...
...Bellow's descriptions of Jerusalem are no less evocative...
...inculte...
...But the sightseeing and storytelling are really only small diversions...
...I remember the era vividly...
...But, put together as Farrell puts them, they come off the tongue as neatly as cummings' "watersmooth silver stallion...
...Peres comes to lunch not to discuss politics, but eager to talk with a fellow writer...
...Over the years be has served as daily book critic for the New York Times, and be is author of Farewell to Reform and The Enterprising Americans...
...The Irish had the edge on the Italians in those days because they had come to America a generation earlier...
...7 0QD0Q6Qii60O0DOQQ6Q00ggOg00ODIoQ000QQgQU0Q00Q0QDQOQ0Q0QO060QQmIOQ0gO0I0000QIIoI~QQQIOIOI00D~0QoIQ~OI00I00D0ODI00B0UQO~D00gQQQIQ0OoQwQ~0QDgO0Qi00QQ~ BOOK REVIEW To Jerusalem and Back Saul BeUow / Viking / 17.95 Naomi Decter A year ago, Saul Bellow spent several months at the Jerusalem artists' colony Mishkenot haSha'ananim...
...So you might think it was Yankee against Italian, only it wasn't...
...John Dean has truly sailed into harbor...
...But novelists deal with what is-and ethnicity is part of the American world which Farrell, in a book title adapted from an A.E...
...You and I have been using these threadbare expressions all our lives, but we could not make them come out with a lilt the way Farrell does...
...Is the United States capable of dealing with that threat...
...Though I am what I suppose should be called a Yankee, I knew Farrell for real the first time I made the acquaintance of his character Studs Lonigan...
...The amazing thing about it is that it shows no loss of ancient skills, no diminution of the ability to project character alive and kicking--mostly kicking--onto the printed page...
...At dinner with the Armenian Archbishop, at lunch with Teddy Kollek, in meetings with other Israeli statesmen and thinkers, as well as with friends, the talk centers on the urgent political problems of Israel and of the world...
...their grief becomes an addiThe Alternative: An American Spectator February 1977 23...
...The Genteel Tradition was dead, by virtue of Mencken's onslaught and Sherman's desertion...
...The new fashion exalted Glenway Wescott saying goodbye to Wisconsin in beautiful sentences, e.e...
...My reasons are obviously conventional: one should object to what goes on in the Iron Curtain lands, for example, not because one has a Polish uncle or a Hungarian wife but because brutality is obscene wherever it occurs...
...Tom parlayed his facility at learning languages into a Dante professorship at Yale (Italian was the best of his ten foreign tongues) just as Jim Farrell (he was Danny O'Neill, wasn't he...
...Unlike the protagonist of the Housman poem, Farrell has never been a stranger and afraid in his own world...
...Bellow scrutinizes the people he meets and recreates them, as perhaps only a novelist can, in a series of small, sharply-drawn portraits...
...Willie Murray was the most imaginative of the bunch: I admired his vocabulary, and had my mouth washed out with soap for bringing some of his words home with me...
...From the beginning he has made his sentences carry the rhythm, the lilt, of Irish-American speech...
...In 1938 he wrote the introduction to the Modern Library edition o f James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan trilogy, gantly called wops and guineas in that day when racial slurs were accepted and shrugged off...
...but Bellow is inevitably drawn back into contemplation of the most pressing issues...
...It is the individual that counts, not the race...
...Dismissing her niece's husband, Jenny says he's not worth the powder to blow him to hell...
...He declares himself willing to believe, with the psalmist, that that light may be "the outer garment of God...
...And Fitzgerald's rhythms 22 The Alternative: An American Spectator February 1977 were as deftly ordered as anything in James Joyce...
...Taken singly, the words--strong, tough, the real stuff--are commonplace...
...To Jerusalem andBaek is BeUow's diary of the trip...
...The end is a picture of the times--the thirties, when a job on WPA was equivalent to hope of heaven--that is absolutely grueling and most depressingly real...
...I omitted mention of Tom Bergin, who might have been likened (in his teens) to Danny O'Neill, the "dippy punk" who was too intellectual to feel easy in Studs' gang...
...The two of them went on to play out their fifth act stoically, the fifth act being prison, featuring the honorable surrender, despairing wife, unexpected pardon, and tearful reunion...
...The Studs Lonigan trilogy was so searing in some of its scenes (especially the rape scene that climaxes The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan) that Farrell has had difficulty in surpassing it...
...Competing with the new tradition of the "fused native art...more choice in manner," Farrell had to fight his way...
...he has come there to hear what they have to say...
...what we resented were the occasional incursions they made on our own turf...
...He captures the odd contrasts of the walled old city, its ancient and beautiful structures surrounded by modern bustle and filth...
...In Israel Bellow is surrounded by people who share his worry...
...If Israelis cannot take their right to live for granted, they live very much as if they could...
Vol. 10 • February 1977 • No. 5
